Yes, yesterday, in a hearing on Capitol Hill, Sen. Barbara Boxer intimated that Condoleezza Rice couldn’t understand the pain of the war because the secretary of state has never had children — unlike, say, Boxer, who then said her children weren’t in danger because “my kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young.” How about the fact that there’s no draft, Mrs. Boxer? This story, which made the front page of my paper today and will become major fodder for talk radio and the TV chat shows over the course of the next week, is an indication of why and how politics is so fluid.

At a high-water mark for Democrats, Barbara Boxer comes along and rains on their parade. She offered exactly kind of stupid insult that resonates far outside the Senate chambers in which she spoke it — because it implicitly insults America’s childless women as well by asserting they can’t understand something women with children can understand. It’s comparable to Newt Gingrich suggesting that Democratic liberal morality helped explain Susan Smith’s murder of her two children — an unforced political error that has the potential to stop a party’s momentum in its tracks and overshadow any legislative accomplishments it makes for a while.